The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (best ereader for pc TXT) 📗

just being voyeuristic, watching other people’s dramas as one would watch a TV box set? With a sigh she finished the coffee.

Upstairs she had wrapped the stone in the silk scarf and put it in a wooden box on the top shelf of the bookcase. It could stay there for now. She somehow doubted if she would need it again.

It felt ridiculous, creeping across the cathedral transept, waiting for a group of visitors to arrive and trying to hide herself amongst their number in order to avoid Sandra’s eagle eye. In the event, the woman was nowhere to be seen and Bea was able to make her way up towards the quire without being observed.

To her relief, the chantry chapel was empty and she could slide into the safety of her corner seat unseen. No one had lit a candle today; the rack was empty save for a few burned-down stubs. After a few minutes she stood up restlessly and went over to select a fresh candle and reach for the lighter, then she knelt down. He wasn’t here, and he wasn’t going to appear. She sensed it with absolute certainty. Why? Why would he abandon her now? And where was he? For the first time she wondered if her gentle, praying priest had an existence away from the chapel. Did his life of prayer and devotion carry on in a different place, on a different plane? Somehow she had assumed he was anchored here, that this had been his whole world, but perhaps not, perhaps he was a travelling adviser, busily shuttling between different customers, as she did when she was working, whether it was at school or in the healing of a house, dropping in, being helpful and moving on.

But I still need you!

Fearing she had cried the words out loud, she shot a quick look towards the doorway, embarrassed, but the chapel stayed empty of enquiring faces. After ten minutes she climbed to her feet and retraced her steps, planning to go home. But that, she realised, was the last place she ought to be because she might not be able to resist going upstairs, and reaching for the stone, and plunging once more into the past. The thought terrified her. She must not lose control. But the lure of what she had seen was like a drug, dragging her back. What had happened to Eadburh after she lost the baby?

She needed to know.

‘Bea? Are you OK?’ Bea was saved by her friend Heather Fawcett, who caught up with her in the middle of the Close. ‘Bea, love, what’s wrong? You look as though you’d seen a ghost!’ Heather was a small woman with neatly waved grey hair and beautiful azure eyes that had been a lethal lure to the young men she had encountered earlier in life. At this moment her eyes were full of sympathy.

Bea and Heather had known and liked each other for many years, since their husbands found themselves in neighbouring parishes in the north of the county at the start of their careers. To have found themselves neighbours had been a serendipitous bonus to their friendship, Bea in the Close and Heather, sadly now widowed and alone but full of energy and optimism, living round the corner in a narrow winding terrace of little Victorian cottages, just outside the cathedral gates. Heather was the only person in the cathedral community to whom Bea had confided her interest in the supernatural and her self-appointed job. She had to talk to someone and Heather, a volunteer and something of a mother figure to the huge number of selfless people who helped keep the cathedral going, would understand.

Shortly after her experience with the poltergeist they had been sitting over a coffee at an outdoor table in the market square, watching the crowds hurrying between the stalls around them, and Bea had poured out the whole story.

‘It was a strange place. That library must have been incredibly old; there were some lovely books there. I don’t know who actually owned that house, but I have to say I wouldn’t have chosen Ken Hutton as my tenant. He wanted to burn all the books afterwards. I begged him not to, but God knows what he did in the end.’

It had been a relief to talk to someone about it and even more of a relief when the lurid headlines had appeared in the paper and she was living in terror of someone finding out it was about her. Heather’s was a voice of steady reassurance.

‘So, did you get rid of the ghost?’ she had asked.

Bea had nodded. ‘I think so. I would have loved to know his story, where he came from, when he lived, what pushed him over the edge like that, but I have to leave it there. That’s one of the rules. I have to leave him in peace now. I don’t want there to be a risk of accidentally calling him back.’

They hadn’t talked about it again.

They sat opposite each other now at Bea’s kitchen table. Bea hesitated for several seconds then she plunged into her tale.

‘I was asked to go up to a cottage on Offa’s Ridge – you know, that wild area up beyond Kington on the border with Wales. It’s being haunted by a wailing voice. A lost soul. I thought I could contact it – you know how I work – and I thought I would be safe. But now,’ she paused, grasping for the right words. Now, I think I’ve got myself in too deep and I don’t know how I’m going to get myself out of it. I don’t want to get myself out of it.’

Heather reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I thought you told me you’d learnt from that experience with the poltergeist.’

Bea gave a wry smile. ‘I’m not proud of the way I’ve handled this. I should have known better.’

‘Indeed you should. Bea, darling, if you’re worried, why don’t you